July 18, 2010

Car Rental Workers Say Hertz Hurts

By Stephen Von SychowskiPeople's Voice July 1-31, 2010On February 2, unionized workers at Hertz Car Rentals in Vancouver and at YVR airport began a legal strike which is now over four months long. At issue are the attempts of the U.S.-based company to rob employees of job security, by reserving the right to lay off full time workers and return them to work as part timers, without the benefits they have fought for and won over the course of more than three decades.

Claims by Hertz about the necessity to make changes out of financial necessity simply don't wash. Hertz is the largest car rental company in the world. They hold an extraordinarily lucrative contract with the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia to provide vehicles to their customers, which include all drivers in BC. They recently tabled an offer to purchase competitor Dollar-Thrifty for the tidy sum of $1.17 billion. Furthermore their latest earnings were extremely positive - $1.7 billion revenue during the most recent financial quarter.

No, this isn't about a company struggling to make a meager profit against greedy workers. Quite the opposite. Hertz workers, members of COPE Local 378, are merely fighting to keep the jobs they already have, in many cases for more than 20 years, with their current hours and benefits. Hertz has the dough, they just don't want to share it with the same hard working people who provided them with the very profits they now greedily horde. Hertz workers are picketing at YVR and at the company's downtown location, asking customers not to rent with Hertz until the dispute is resolved.

A small group of just over 50 workers striking for their jobs and their livelihood may sound like small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps, but a lot more is at stake in this strike. That's because while Hertz has got away with their anti-worker campaign in non-union shops, they are now up against union workers in an airport of union-certified car rental agencies. The precedent set by this strike may affect the course of collective bargaining between the unions (COPE and the Teamsters) and employers (Avis, Dollar-Thrifty, National-Alamo, Budget) in the years to come.The nasty anti-union campaign launched by Hertz is indicative of a broader trend of employers, both organized and un-organized, to drive down wages and benefits in order to maximize profits and make working people pay for the current global capitalist economic crisis. Whether it's a car rental clerk, a paramedic, a grocery store teller, or a steelworker, we should not be fooled into thinking that what we are up against is fundamentally different, separate, or apart. Let's all support the fight for job security at Hertz, not just for them, but for us all.

** Since this article was published, Hertz workers won a new Collective Agreement with their employer and have returned to work.**

3 comments:

Hi there, My name is Gulsah and I work for Hertz. We have been working hard to reach an agreement with our workers even before you posted this article and the agreement has been in place way before you published your blog post. Hertz cares about its employees. Therefore we worked very hard on our end to settle the dispute. I hope this clarifies your comments and the timing of your article.

I spent some time walking the picket line at Hertz during actions organized by the union and even on my own a couple of times. I talked to the workers there, to the union reps there, and I saw with my own eyes what was happening.

I don't know if you are a manager at this Hertz or someone from corporate, but I know that managemetn at Hertz was for a long time not trying to resolve the issue, but to break the union. They threatened people with firing and discipline for excercising their legal right to strike, called people names, sent out ROE's as an intimidation tactic, and more. This on top of being scabs doing striking workers jobs.

From what I saw and heard this doesn't require your "clarification". It's a clear case of a greedy transnational corporation trying to rob their workers of their benefits and job security - and being beaten back when the workers stood together and fought back.

It's ludicrous that Hertz would try to take credit for settling the dispute when they caused it with their attack against "their" workers. Hertz workers on their own merit, because they fought.